Global Summit on the Physical Activity of Children and Youth – a recap

By Louise Choquette

This week I had the pleasure of attending the Global Summit on the Physical Activity of Children and Youth held in Toronto. There were 900 delegates from 31 countries present, so, it was a BIG deal. I feel privileged to have attended on behalf of Health Nexus and I’d like to share some highlights from the event with you all.

The media was quite active in reporting on this summit, largely due to the unveiling of the Global Matrix on Tuesday, where 15 countries were compared on 9 criteria. It sounds like this event was at the top of the Twitter trending world on Tuesday. Perhaps this is because Canada is not doing particularly well… Of sad interest: building an environment conducive to physical activity is not linked to greater overall physical activity… You can download the various versions of the report card here, as well as media sharing tools.

The conference was very interesting and the keynote speakers were outstanding. There was a heavy lean towards research and less so on population-based interventions. The focus was on school-aged kids as opposed to those from 0-6 years old. The networking was very dynamic and valuable.

All the research articles shared at the event are offered in an open-access supplement of the Journal of physical activity and health available here.

Active Healthy Kids Canada will be producing conference proceedings in the next few weeks and that the videotaped sessions (including keynotes) will be available. They will also provide tools for disseminating those.